Sunday, July 8, 2007

A Western Sense of Place

Since I’ve been doing the Southern Reading Challenge at Maggie Reads, and thinking about “sense of place” in Southern literature, it’s made me think about the literature of the place I was born, grew up in, and still live: the American West. I think Western literature is a wonderful and very wide genre, and it probably deserves its own challenge. But I’m not up to hosting a challenge (technologically or time-wise), so I thought I would just post a list of some of my favorite western books, and maybe inspire someone to read something western that they haven’t read before. (Or inspire someone else to host a western challenge!)

Some of the books on this list could also be defined as “frontier literature”. And of course the west is physically huge and diverse, so sometimes the best Western literature is set in cities, or on the shore of the Pacific. Also, I had to include some memoirs, because they really moved me, or really depicted something about the west that no one else has. Here’s my list:

Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx

That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx

Anything by Wallace Stegner, but especially:

Angle of Repose

Big Rock Candy Mountain

White Fang by Jack London

Call of the Wild by Jack London

Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston

The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie

My Antonia by Willa Cather

O Pioneers by Willa Cather

The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

Shane by Jack Schaefer

Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson

Ask the Dust by John Fante

Brotherhood of the Grape by John Fante

Pulp by Charles Bukowski (and almost anything else he wrote)

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

Roughing It by Mark Twain

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a short story by Mark Twain

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols

Valdez is Coming by Elmore Leonard

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (okay, mainly set in China, but also in the Bay Area)

Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean

Anything by Jim Harrison, including:

Dalva

Legends of the Fall

Sundog

Anything by Raymond Carver, including:

Where I’m Calling From

Short Cuts

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

The Mountains of California by John Muir

The Player by Michael Tolkin

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

Across the High Lonesome by James McNay Brumfield

Aquaboogie by Susan Straight

Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights by Susan Straight

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy

The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson

Bad Lands by Oakley Hall

Giant Joshua by Maureen Whipple

Rest of the Earth by William H. Henderson

True Grit by Charles Portis

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Left-Handed Poems by Michael Ondaatje

Desperadoes by Ron Hansen

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen

The Ancient Child by M. Scott Momaday

Ghost Town by Robert Coover

Deadwood by Pete Dexter

Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell

Mamaw by Susan Dodd

Liar’s Moon by Philip Kimball

Bucking the Tiger by Bruce Olds

Welcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow

Silver Light by David Thomson

The Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter

Generation X by Douglas Coupland

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Anything by Louis L’Amour

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams

Anything by Ivan Doig, including

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

The Whistling Season

Whew! I’d welcome any additions to the list, so please tell me about your favorite western books and I’ll add them.

24 comments:

I absolutely loved Lonesome Dove. I only wish I would have read the first two before it, but I didn't find out they existed until I was halfway through! Anyway, there's nothing like a good western. (My father was a cowboy, and is such a hero to me.) Have you read any westerns by Robert Parker? He's more known for his mysteries, but Apalloosa (SP?!) was good.

bellezza--I've never read Robert Parker, though I know a bunch of people who are fans of the Spenser series. I'll have to check out the westerns. I'm not a huge reader of "westerns" (in the cowboy sense) but I love western movies. I just forced my kids to sit through "The Big Country" with Gregory Peck, and they enjoyed it, after they stopped kicking and screaming.

Diddo what myutopia said - that's a wonderful list! I've read all of three things on that list: My Antonia, The Woman Warrior, and Devil in a Blue Dress. I loved all of them. Oh this list is bad, bad, bad. More books for my TBR list! Will it ever end?!

bybee--I haven't read any Conrad Richter but the Awakening Land trilogy sounds like western literature, even though they're only heading to Ohio, because it is about the beginning of America's westward movement. And I had completely forgotten about The Sea of Grass, his novel about the New Mexico territory, which totally fits into the western category!

john--I did think of L'Amour, but I haven't read any, and he's written so much, I was just flummoxed when looking at his list. Can you give me a couple of titles? And I'll put Generation X on the list, thanks!

stefanie--of course, Chandler! (I say "duh!" to myself and give myself a dope slap to the back of the head).

Probably Dashiell Hammett and a bunch of other noir-type writers fit the bill, too.

Ooh, I just had another thought--Janet Fitch's White Oleander. The list goes on...

maggie--Actually, when I was looking around for Western literature I noticed that there is some overlap, because Texas is sometimes considered Southern and sometimes Western. (I guess various places that were once on the frontier were once the western-most settled places in the country.) But when I was looking through Texas literature, it was mostly categorized as Southern, but occasionally the books were what I thought of as westerns.

Actually, I can't really help out with L'Amour. I've only read one by him and don't remember it except that I wasn't impressed. It probably came across that I was a fan, eh? Not so, he's just the first author I think of when I think of Westerns.

john--I hear ya. I think L'Amour's was the first name that came into my head when I starting coming up with Westerns, too. But I've never read any of his many, many books. My husband read one when he was a teenager, and the only thing he remembers about it is a description of a woman--"she sat well in the saddle". At the time, he thought that meant she had a nice butt. Now it's sort of a family joke :)